Winter Landscape

Thayer returned to the landscape genre in earnest near the turn of the century. The painting of the scenery around his Dublin home is said to have been a therapeutic distraction for the artist when he was faced with unsolved problems in his figural works. He revered the New Hampshire landscape, particularly nearby Mount Monadnock, which he painted many times. Taking his cue from his favorite philosopher, Ralph Waldo Emerson, he looked to the study of landscape for the moral truth it would yield, a rationale also used by the artist to explain his allegorical pictures of women. "Winter Landscape" was painted during the first year that Thayer's family remained in Dublin through the cold months. Pristine blankets of snow obviously appealed to him; most of the landscapes of this period are winter scenes. Through them, he was able to demonstrate repeatedly how the light turquoise winter sky creates blue shadows on the snow, an important principle in his theories of the protective coloration of blue jays. Typical of his landscapes, Thayer's NA diploma piece combines areas of thick, frenetic brushwork with seemingly unfinished portions of bare, taupe canvas. The white layer of snow appears laid in after, and on top of, the dark green forms of the pine trees. Like a kind of low-lying fog, it works its way up between trunks and over branches. Neighboring planes of color remain unresolved where their edges meet. Throughout, an overall flatness and subordination of subject to calligraphic design link the work to the Asian ink paintings which Thayer would have known through the interests of his patron Charles Lang Freer, a pioneer collector of Chinese and Japanese art.